Comments on "marriage"

In the wake of the success of
Proposition 8
in California, this has appeared in several blogs (mostly on LiveJournal):

Copy this sentence into your journal
if you have ever been in a heterosexual marriage
and the idea of same-sex marriage being a threat
to your heterosexual marriage is the biggest
bunch of shit you ever heard.

I'm not sure I can quite affirm that, just because there's
such a tremendous amount of stupidity and silliness out there, but
it's certainly a strong contender.

I have long thought that issues like love and sex and
religion and fertility are basically none of the state's
business, and that its involvement in "marriage" should
amount only to having some sort of legally recognized
partnership (which might or might not be called "marriage")
that people – any people – can enter into,
whereby they pool their goods and various other interests.
Then those who want the partnership they're entering into
to be formally approved by their religion, or marked
with special declarations of love and faithfulness,
or whatever, can do that in whatever way they find best.
(And those who feel that their own marriage is somehow
threatened by someone else's can go jump in a lake.)

And, in case it's not obvious, such a partnership
needn't have anything to do with love or sex or children,
though of course many of them would.

This is a special case of a general principle that
seems obvious to me (though I have trouble saying exactly
why it should be right, which may be a warning sign):
governments shouldn't try to legislate for things they
can't reasonably enforce – such as a partnership's
really being anything to do with love, sex and children.

(Of course there are all sorts of details that would
need to be right, and I'm not going to try to discuss
them here.)

while he may know how to make a good first impression, he may not know how to hold on to it- alas for me, as a co-tribe member

a

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